This is real sugar cane from Cuba, growing in Venezuela's Yaracuy state. Yaracuy is the heavenly, I mean, heavily, agricultural state where our good friend Daniel lives.

It's loaded with Cuban sugar fields. It also has sugar processing, refining and export facilities. Some of the sugar goes to make rum.

A Cuban farmer who lives in Venezuela took me through the sugar fields and several times I had to ask him to ... stop the truck, because it was so beautiful I just needed to look at it. It looked like ... heaven.

He had grown Cuban sugar in his family for generations, always doing the backbreaking farm labor, working, improving the land, amassing capital when times were good and saving it for when times were bad. He and Daniel took me everywhere. Contrary to stereotypes of farmers, my Cuban farmer was a college graduate of a good U.S. university, majoring in agricultural science.

His farm is now under seige, by Venezuelan land expropriators. He had to call his wife on his cellphone every couple hours to assure her that out in the fields he had not been kidnapped by the expropriating thugs.

Horribly enough, castro is behind all of these actions that have put even these distant Cuban sugar fields under siege.

After fleeing castro in the 1960s for the then-undeveloped farmlands of remote parts of Venezuela, my farmer now sees castro coming right back for him and his productive and beautiful sugar lands. Make no mistake, castro continues to harbor dreams of retaking dominance in the sugar industry he already drove into the ground in Cuba. That's why he's looking further afield to Venezuela. He will do the exact same thing to Venezuela's sugar fields as he did to Cuba's.

It's not well known but castro has taken over every key office of the Venezuelan agricultural office. And castro's special target is Cuban immigrants who made this land in Venezuela flourish.

I will write and post more later but I just wanted to post a picture I hope you might enjoy for the beauty of its own that once also graced Cuba before castro for now.

Gotta run off to a conference for work, back later on...

From CubaNet....

Government seizes land from independent farmer

CIEGO DE AVILA, Cuba, March 29 (Abel Escobar / www.cubanet.org) - The agriculture ministry has seized state land that Manuel Ramírez Guerra, president of the Independent Farmers of Ciego de Avila, had been using for the past 10 years.

Ramírez Guerra said the seizure was the latest incident since he founded the farm, movement six months ago. He said since then he has been fined twice, for 200 and 1,000 pesos, lost the use of his own tractor and had his home attacked.

He said that officials from the agriculture ministry issued him a citation March 13. he said he was told the state was taking back the land and would also seize his tractor unless it was put to use on behalf of the government.

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That last sentence fulfills the classical definition of Medieval serfdom. But not exactly. Most Medievel noblemen, high in their castles, nevertheless allowed serfs to keep some portion of their earnings from their labors.

castro is a bit different. In his case, the $550 million bearded barbarian requires a 100% tribute. He'll take nothing less.

castro's Cuba makes Medieval serfdom look generous and benevolent by comparison. It goes to show that being a Medieval serf is a step up from the oppression of castrodom. Serfs had more rights, ate better and got better medical care from the local achemist than the nonexistent benefits of all sorts that castro so loves to tout to the world's gullible and pendejoistic Sandalistas.

These castroite serf conditions are unbelievable.